Justice Shallow down to the gentle Master Slender and the sweet Anne Page.  Ten thousand honours and blessings on the bard who has thus gilded the dull realities of life with innocent illusions.”  Wherefore, in spite of the sneers of Master Would-be Wiseman, let us continue to make these pleasant pilgrimages; not alone for our own satisfaction and betterment, but also in memory of those who have opened before us so many delectable lands of fancy, and given us so many agreeable companions of the road.

This volume, then, is the pilgrim’s guide to Dickens’ Land—the loving topography of that fertile and very populous region.  No far away foreign country is Dickens’ Land.  It lies at our doors; we may explore it when we choose, with never a passport to purchase nor a Custom House to fear.  The sojourner in London can scarce look from his windows without beholding scores of its interesting places.  To parody that passage which describes Mr. Pickwick’s outlook into Goswell Street—Dickens’ Land is at our feet; Dickens’ Land is on our right hand as far as the eye can reach; Dickens’ Land extends on our left, and the opposite side of Dickens’ Land is over the way.  Nor do the bounds of this genial territory confine themselves to London alone.  Outlying portions spread north and south, east and west, over England.  There is even, as Sala showed, a Dickens’ quarter in Paris; and we have unexpectedly encountered small colonies of Dickens’ Land across the wide Atlantic.  But the best of it lies close to the great heart of the world—in London, or in the counties thereabout; and if “Rambles in Dickens’ Land” succeeds in guiding its readers with pleasure and profit over this storied ground, it will have faithfully fulfilled its mission.

Trouble has not been spared to make this topography accurate as well as entertaining.  Mr. Weller the younger, with all his “extensive and peculiar” knowledge of London—Mr. Weller the elder and his brothers of the whip, with their knowledge of post-roads and coaching inns, could hardly have identified the various localities more clearly than the compiler has done.  Wherever doubts and disputes arise—as in regard to the site of the “Old Curiosity Shop”—all sides of the case are given, and the reader is asked to sum up the arguments and judge for himself.  In nearly every instance a quotation is offered from the author, by means of which the pilgrim is enabled to refresh his memory and bring his own recollections of the book to bear upon the question of the site.  These quotations will be found to act admirably as aids to memory, and to obviate the necessity of carrying a whole library of Dickens about on one’s rambles.  Take, for example, the excerpts from “David Copperfield” in connection with the visit to Dover.  The facetious answers of the boatmen to David when, sitting ragged and forlorn in the Dover Market Place, he inquires for his aunt’s house, bring back at a single touch the whole sad story of the boy’s tramp from London to the coast.  It does not require much imagination to picture him sitting there “on the step of an empty shop,” with his weary, pinched face and his “dusty sunburnt, half-clothed figure,” while the sea-faring folk (lineal forbears of those who frequent the place to-day) made mock of him with their clumsy japes, until at length happened by the friendly fly-driver, who showed him how to reach the residence of the old lady who “carries a bag—bag with a good deal of room in it—is gruffish, and comes down upon you, sharp.”  It is easy, too, with the help of our guide, to follow the shivering child along the cliffs to Miss Trotwood’s—nay, to identify the “very neat little cottage, with cheerful bow-windows,” where that good soul looked after Mr. Dick, and defended her “immaculate grass-plot” against marauding donkeys.  It is this present writer’s privilege to know a charming elderly lady who boasts of Dover as her birthplace, and who, when she has exhausted the other lions of that town, is accustomed to close her remarks with the statement that she “lived for years within a stone’s-throw of Miss Betsy Trotwood’s cottage.”  Occasionally the Superior Person (who, alas, is rarely absent nowadays!) points out with a smile of tolerance that neither Miss Trotwood nor yet her house ever existed save in the novelist’s brain.  Whereupon this charming old lady shakes her finger testily at the transgressor, and exclaims, “It is quite evident that you have never lived in Dover.  Miss Betsy Trotwood a myth, indeed!  Let me tell you that my own mother knew the dear woman well—yes, and that delightful Mr. Dick too; and she remembered seeing Mr. Dickens drive up in a fly from the railway station to visit them.  Of course their names were not ‘Trotwood’ and ‘Dick’ at all; it would never have done for Mr. Dickens to put them in his book under the real names, particularly as Mr. Dick was related to many good families in that part of Kent.  I have even a dim recollection of seeing Miss Trotwood being wheeled about in a bath-chair when I was a very little girl and she a very old woman.  Myth, indeed!  Why, there are old men in Dover now who were warned off the grass-plot by David Copperfield’s aunt when they were donkey-boys.”  The animation of the speaker shows that she believes everything she says.  Perhaps a lady possessing the characteristics of Miss Betsy did once upon a time inhabit the cottage in Dover.  Perhaps there was a real Mr. Dick.  Otherwise these recollections are but another example of that hypnotism exercised over posterity by the great romancers, to which allusion has already been made.

Again, the many references and the quotations made from several of Dickens’ works, illustrative of the Temple and the Lincoln’s Inn quarter—(pages 2 to 25 in the ensuing “Rambles”)—are certain to be appreciated by the Rambler.  With their assistance he can summon back to his memory the tender love story of Ruth Pinch, and so dream away a happy hour in peaceful Fountain Court; follow in fancy Maypole Hugh and the illustrious Captain Sim Tappertit as they ascended the stairs to Sir John Chester’s chambers in Paper Buildings; stroll thoughtfully along King’s Bench Walk with the spirit of Sidney Carton; and, in the purlieus of Chancery Lane, review the legal abuses of the past—(perhaps even some of those that survive to-day)—reflect upon “Jarndyce and Jarndyce,” or upon the banished sponging-houses of this district, and once more admit that Dickens the great novelist was also Dickens the great reformer.

An important feature of “Rambles in Dickens’ Land” will be found in the exhaustive references to Dickens’ own haunts and homes, and the haunts and homes of many of his relatives and friends.  Naturally, these are in numerous cases intimately bound up with the creations of his novels, for Dickens did not “write out of an inkwell,” but looked for inspiration to real life and real scenes.  At Portsmouth our volume guides you to the house where he was born, and to the old church register wherein the christening is entered of—(how strangely the full name sounds!)—“Charles John Huffham Dickens.”  But the same venerable seaport is thronged with memories of Nicholas Nickleby and his player-friends, Miss Snevellicci, the Crummles family, poor Smike and the rest.  It is interesting to remember that an American writer once suggested the possibility that Dickens had obtained Nickleby’s experiences as an actor from personal adventures with a travelling “troupe” during his youth.  This is not